Process scaling and rising device density increase power density and thermal effects for integrated circuits. Increased power consumption and temperature may affect integrated circuit performance by changing transistor carrier mobility, decreasing threshold voltage, and increasing parasitic resistance. Circuit reliability may also be affected through increased electronmigration, dielectric breakdown and negative body biasing. There has been considerable interest in conducting power and thermal analysis for a circuit design.
A power profile can be obtained using circuit simulators such as SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) simulators. A circuit simulator formulates circuit equations and then numerically solves them to compute the circuit response to a particular stimulus. While offering superior precision, running simulation can be quite expensive. Simulating even a small circuit, for example, may take hours. On the other hand, a designer often, especially at early stages of a design process, needs only an estimation of power and thermal profiles for the design. It is thus desirable to search for techniques that can provide a quick estimation of what the power profile of a circuit design could be and which the thermal profile could be derived based on the power profile.